Movie Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

This should have been easy.

Wolverine's origin has been done countless times in the comics. Bit by bit, little pieces of James "Logan" Howlett's 200-year life were filled in. Some bits were as inconsequential as him fighting with Benjamin Grimm (the Thing) during World War II. Some were as monumental as the guy's real name. There was a miniseries published just a few years ago that was "the definitive" Wolverine origin and, by most accounts, it was pretty decent.

The writers, producers, and directors of X-Men Origins: Wolverine decided to take the hard road. Not only did they ignore the countless who, what, where, when, and whys of Logan's life from the comics, they ignored the one from the highly successful film franchise, too.

It's not enough that Wolverine is dunked in a pool, pumped full of metal, and dies for a minute before coming back as a creature of unbridled rage who can't remember his past and has nothing linking him to it but an obscure code name stamped onto his dog tag.

It has to start at the very beginning, in Canada's Northwest Territories, in a time before Canada or the Northwest Territories existed. Little James Howlett (Hugh Jackman) is always sick, which is great because his mutant ability will later allow him to shrug off cannon fire. A traumatic childhood event leads to he and his half-brother Victor Creed (Leiv Schreiber) running away from Canada to the United States, where they fight in every major American war from the Civil War to Vietnam, though we skip the Korean War because that was all golf practice on helicopter pads. "I'm Canadian," Logan says later, when his former commanding officer William Stryker (Danny Huston) appeals to his patriotism, which implies that the 200 years he spent killing people was a barrel of monkeys...at least until Creed screws it up by trying to rape a Vietnamese woman, which leads to a broader incident involving a firing squad that leads to the two being inducted into a special black-ops program featuring seven or eight of the most wooden, generic characters you'll find this side of Blockbuster Video's action section.

Valuable face time is given to each of these mutants, even the one whose mutant power appears to be imitating John Woo movies. Logan, who stuck with Creed even after he tried to commit a horrible atrocity on a defenseless woman, can take no more when he follows through on orders to kill an entire African village for not knowing where a meteorite came from (though their "the sky" answer is actually pretty truthful).

So he leaves the team (which falls apart in his absence) and retreats to the Canadian Rockies, where he gets married and lives in an incredibly cool house. Things go poorly when Stryker shows up to ask him for help, and, the next day, Victor Creed kills Logan's wife. Stryker convinces Wolverine to let him pump adamantium into his body, and the movie proceeds from there with three constants: boring mutants, boring fight scenes, and boring dialog.

The whole thing is an incompetent money grab. Fox made a big deal about the leaked work print being an unfinished product without the full oomph and pow of the real thing. The explosions were huge, but the small stuff they either forgot to fix or figured nobody would notice were unforgivable. The first time Wolverine pops his adimantium laced claws, each one is as large as a machete, rendered for a character model on an outdated video game system. The size and shape of the claws change from there.

Gavin Hood gets nothing from his actors, but throwing him under the bus is pointless. Will.i.Am is the fourth-billed actor, and the young mutants who appear later in the movie are unknowns. Hood himself is somewhat new behind the camera - this is his third feature, and he received no help from his screenwriters, whose script is something like what a William S. Burroughs devotee would come up with given a two week deadline, twelve stock characters, and a crate of rejected Stallone/Schwarzenegger/Segal scripts.

The effect is something like a wrecking ball, smashing the continuity established by the previous three X-Men films, which weren't in need of a reboot so much as a new director. To the best of my knowledge, this isn't a reboot, so a story that was supposed to explain the beginning of things leaves us with nothing more than questions. The biggest one: With so many witnesses to the event that resulted in Logan's losing his memory, why can't anybody simply fill him in? The answer, unless there's an X-Men 4 to answer it, is that Charles Xavier is an incredibly narrow-minded, forgetful telepath, an asshole, or both.



Shut the Fuck Up, Donny

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Previously...

Wolverine and Why He's Your Favorite X-Man